Retrospect, Inc.

Paperless finances are ubiquitous these days. Every financial institution promotes paperless billing and paperless statements. You can get an email every month, letting you know the latest statement is ready for your perusal and download. No more paper copies to store somewhere. It’s a welcome step toward reducing physical clutter, but those statements are still relevant, both now and far into the future. Keeping a local copy, albeit a digital version, is still an important step in protecting your finances.

Keep a Local Copy

If institutions store electronic versions of every bill, you shouldn’t need to download them until you need them. As with file backup, the issue is relying on a third party for access to your critical data–finances in this case. There are two fundamental issues: availability and access.

Availability

Transitioning to electronic finances is difficult because expectations diverge. Customers might expect that with paperless statements, their finances will be available for the lifetime of their account. However, that assumption is rarely the case. All financial institutions allow customers to download statements from the past three to six months, but earlier than that, practices vary wildly. Some charge a service fee for downloading statements prior to that; others offer to send a paper copy, also for a fee. And the lengths vary between credit card accounts and checking/savings accounts, even at the same institution. See a few examples below:

Bank of America: 3 years of paperless statements, prior statements by mail for $3.

Fidelity: 10 years of paperless statements, prior statements by mail at no charge.

Moreover, policies change, so these numbers might not be accurate in six months.

Access

Availability presumes you have access. You might forget your password or lose access to your email that’s connected to the account. You might close your account. You might even suffer from identity theft. There are a multitude of edge cases that come up where you can no longer access your online account and statements, regardless of how many months or years are available.

Which Institutions

Local copies of your paperless financials are good, but you need to consider which institutions to include. The conventional wisdom is to keep bills and credit card statements for a year, bank statements and tax-related bills and statements for seven years, and retirement account statements and tax returns permanently. However, with electronic statements occupying an infinitesimal amount of space on modern storage, keeping records permanently is straight-forward.

A recent change to also consider is the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and Social Security Administration (SSA) going paperless. You can now create an account with both to access digital versions of personalized IRS documents or your social security benefit statement. In particular, the IRS provides the following Transcripts, necessary for various legal agreements like loans, at no charge. The "Tax Return Transcript" document generally meets the needs of lending institutions offering mortgages and student loans.

Complete Data Protection

At Retrospect, we’re always thinking about how to protect all of your data. Valuable data isn’t just Word documents, Exchange databases, and Hyper-V guests. Your financial history is absolutely critical to your business or personal life, and with the advent of paperless finances, we need to adjust our steps for protecting that data without relying on third parties. The best backup is the one you manage, because you’re the person it matters the most to.

We recently co-hosted a partner training with KCIS in Faridabad, India. Thanks to the dozen partners who joined! It was great to meet everyone and hear about how Retrospect’s hybrid data protection can help their customers protect their whole environments.

PLEASANTON, Calif.—September 14, 2016—Retrospect®, Inc., makers of award-winning Retrospect Backup & Recovery software, today announced cloud storage support for Dropbox with seamless integration with the latest release of Retrospect's hybrid data protection solution. Retrospect 11.5 for Windows and Retrospect 13.5 for Mac allow Dropbox users to back up their critical data off-site to Dropbox, including Basic, Pro, and Business accounts.

Dropbox is used by more than 500 million users to store their information in the cloud and synchronize it across their devices. According to a survey conducted with Google Consumer Survey of 1,000 small business owners in the United States, 49% of small businesses use Dropbox at work. Businesses are now able to combine Dropbox cloud storage with Retrospect's powerful cloud backup feature set, including zero-knowledge security with industry-standard AES-256 encryption.

“Dropbox support was the most requested cloud storage provider among our customers since cloud storage support was released earlier this year,” says Jean-Christian Dumas, Vice President of Worldwide Sales. “Integrating Dropbox support in Retrospect allows customers to take advantage of Retrospect's hybrid data protection with on-site and off-site backups of critical business data.”

“90% of our customers use Dropbox to store and share files. It makes sense to use Retrospect to protect these systems too, and with Retrospect's AES-256 encryption, we truly have a secure cloud storage. Dropbox is free forever for 2GB of storage and scales up to 1TB and beyond with an affordable yearly subscription, making it an attractive choice for small businesses,” says James Rothschild at JRP Support.

In addition to Dropbox, Retrospect continues to expand its growing list of certified cloud storage providers with AWS Mumbai, Swisscom, and Cloudian. With Retrospect, customers are not locked into a service provider, and migrating their data to a different one only takes a couple clicks.

With every certified cloud storage provider, Retrospect allows customers to protect their entire environment on-site on disk and tape or off-site in the cloud, giving them instant access to files and systems locally with the added protection of a remote backup. This latest software release also includes two new features to help small businesses manage their environments:

Server Configuration Management – Businesses can easily manage their Retrospect configuration through a new import and export interface, with cross-platform support and per-module import settings.

Reduced Storage Footprint – Retrospect's storage footprint has been dramatically reduced for backup metadata on media when using compression, with data storage savings of up to 90%.

Software Platform Certifications

Retrospect 11.5 for Windows and Retrospect 13.5 for Mac are certified for the latest system updates to Windows and Mac:

Windows Server 2016 (pending final release)

Windows SQL Server 2016 (Windows only)

Windows Server Core 2008 R2, 2012, 2016 (pending final release)

Windows 10 Anniversary Update

macOS Sierra 10.12 (pending final release)

Along with the latest system updates, Retrospect continues to support older systems including Windows XP and OS X Snow Leopard, ensuring businesses have total coverage in case of accident, failure, or disaster.

About Retrospect

Retrospect backup and recovery software provides small and midsize businesses with the reliability, ease of use, power, and flexibility needed to protect critical data on mixed-platform networks. Retrospect offers local and offsite backups, precise point-in-time restores, file-level deduplication, iOS remote management of multiple backup servers, end-user-initiated restores, and industry-leading customer support. With more than two decades of field-tested expertise and millions of users worldwide, Retrospect meets the needs of organizations that require the highest level of recoverability.

LTO-7 is the seventh generation of the LTO format standard, the world’s most popular tape format, with a native capacity of 6TB and a compressed capacity of 15TB. For comparison, LTO-6 had a native capacity of 2.5TB with a compressed capacity of 6.25TB. The LTO-7 format represents a 2.4x increase in data storage.

“Tape backup remains a critical part of many businesses' complete data protection strategy,” says Jean-Christian Dumas, Vice President of Worldwide Sales. “LTO-7 pushes the boundaries on how much data businesses can store in this cheap, durable storage format, and HPE StoreEver helps customers easily manage huge amounts of data for long-term storage with quick retrieval.”

Retrospect backup and recovery software provides small and midsize businesses with the reliability, ease of use, power, and flexibility needed to protect critical data on mixed-platform networks. Retrospect offers local and offsite backups, precise point-in-time restores, file-level deduplication, iOS remote management of multiple backup servers, end-user-initiated restores, and industry-leading customer support. With more than two decades of field-tested expertise and millions of users worldwide, Retrospect meets the needs of organizations that require the highest level of recoverability.

The rise of mobile devices has made "Bring your own device" (BYOD) an inevitable part of every business's IT environment. Employees don't want to carry two devices just to check work email, but employers need to ensure their corporate data is protected on mobile devices, just like any other device in the company. Mobile device data–like emails, notes, and particularly custom data from specialized apps–should be backed up.

Cloud backup services like Apple’s iCloud or Samsung’s provides an excellent offsite protection for mobile devices. However, it has two significant limitations for businesses. First, it’s owned by the employee. The employer doesn’t have access to it, unless the employee hands over their credentials. Second, it’s not on-site. Offsite protection is a critical part of any backup strategy, but on-site storage is as well. With on-site backup storage, employers know they have a local copy of their business that they can restore quickly to reduce any downtime.

Why Local Backup?Having a local backup through your computer, in addition to a remote backup through a cloud service, ensures your mobile life is protected in two places and that one backup is immediately available. In data protection, we have a backup strategy called the "3-2-1 Rule":

3: Keep three copies of all of your data.2: Use two different storage media.1: Store one of the copies offsite.Following the "3-2-1 Rule" ensures your data is spread across three devices, on multiple media, in different places.

Our newest team member Heinz-Jochen Peters joined the Retrospect Sales team in July as the Regional Sales Manager for Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Although he is new to Retrospect, Heinz brings over 25 years of sales experience with the DACH market.

When asked “What do you like about being a part of the Retrospect team?”, Heinz said, “It is an exciting and interesting task to develop and build up a significant market in Europe. I also like to be part of a winning team that is able to make very quick decisions and have fun working with each other. I strongly believe in the growth of Retrospect. It is great to be a part of it.”

Developing and building things clearly plays an important role in Heinz’s life. In his free time, he and his son developed a new board game for kids, and they are currently in negotiations with a large game manufacturer. He has also founded an Internet service for musicians to sell their music directly from their website. We look forward to great things from Heinz!

So were we, so we we conducted a survey of 1,000 small business owners about their experiences with data protection, data loss, and business downtime. Did you know that the highest wage earners back up the most often? Or that 7% of respondents had an employee down for more than a week due to a data loss incident?

Data loss happens more often than you think. You accidentally delete an important document. Your kids pour juice on your laptop. You drive off to work with your phone on the car roof. Or worse, your house floods.

With Retrospect Desktop, family photos, tax documents, schoolwork, music, and videos on every device are safe. Every time you do a backup with Retrospect, you protect yourself from accidents, failures, loss, and theft.﻿﻿

--

Every computer in your household - Safeguard up to six computers–Windows, Mac, and even Linux–and monitor them from a single place.

Any file or every file - ﻿Back up an entire computer or just certain documents to an external hard drive, a network-attached storage (NAS) device, or the cloud.

Mobile Backup - Don't worry if your phone is lost or stolen.﻿﻿﻿

Secure in the cloud - Use Amazon, Google, or another cloud for offsite protection with secure AES-256 encryption.

Join us at ASCII IT SMB Success Summit in Anaheim! Learn about Retrospect's hybrid backup capabilities with cloud storage for complete SMB protection. Werner Walter, Director of North America Sales, will be on-site.

Off-site data protection is a critical piece of any business’s data protection strategy, as corporate data is always at risk from accidental loss, malicious threats, or natural disasters. Keeping a copy of critical data in a separate location safeguards it against loss, providing a further layer of protection. In addition, an off-site location can securely store archived content that is no longer in use.

Cloud Backup

Cloud backup to third-party cloud storage providers allows Retrospect customers a seamless way to protect their Windows, Mac, and Linux environment off-site. Retrospect is certified for cloud storage with worldwide cloud storage providers Amazon S3 and Google Cloud Storage, as well as regional cloud storage providers DreamHost, Dunkel, ArubaCloud, and Numergy. A full list of certified providers is available at retrospect.com/cloudcertified.

According to Gartner’s 2015 Magic Quadrant for Public Cloud Storage Services [1], “customers should consider augmenting their on-premises environments with public cloud storage for use cases such as content distribution, media streaming, archiving, backup and disaster recovery”. Their report names Amazon and Google as leaders in the public cloud storage market, noting their aggressive pricing and continued innovation.

Retrospect’s cloud backup support offers a number of advantages:

Cost Effective – Public cloud storage providers like Amazon and Google offer the lowest prices for storage with a pay-for-use model, rather than flat-fee storage tiers.

No Cloud Storage Lock-in – The cloud storage landscape is evolving fast, and customers are always able to find the best fit for their environment by migrating between providers.

Advanced Seeding and Large Scale Recovery Support – Bandwidth is a limiting factor for cloud backup, so Retrospect supports seeding options for the initial backup and large scale recovery for large restore scenarios.

Private Cloud Support – Retrospect is certified to back up to Basho Riak CS, an open-source software that allows partners to run a private cloud in their own data center. Partners can quickly set up their own private cloud for their customers to utilize.

“The addition of public and private cloud backup to Retrospect is great news for companies that want the ability to back up to a medium that is on site as well as having the safety net of data being stored off site,” said Owen Williams, IT Collective.

Partner Cloud Certification

Retrospect Partners are now able to become “Cloud Certified” with our new Cloud Certification Program. Partners can set up their own private cloud solution for their customers to use, and Retrospect will certify and call out these new “Cloud Certified” partners at retrospect.com/cloudcertified.

Performance-Optimized Grooming

Retrospect v11 for Windows and Retrospect v13 for Mac include a new performance-optimized grooming mode that is up to 5x faster. With grooming, customers stay protected with a long-term backup retention policy to ensure recovery from yesterday, last week, last month, or five years ago, using storage that fits their budget. Performance-optimized grooming enables customers to quickly leverage this space-saving process.

This latest release also offers other features and performance enhancements:

Performance improvements: Backup and restore are up to 20% faster with under-the-hood optimizations. Catalog rebuild is up to 3x faster with a new fast rebuild mode. With these improvements, Retrospect delivers shorter backup windows and reduced recovery times.

“Retrospect now represents the hybrid Backup and Disaster Recovery solution of choice for SMBs, with the added safety and security of cloud backups complementing the easy accessibility of primary onsite backups for improved business continuity after a data loss,” says Jean-Christian Dumas, Vice President of Worldwide Sales. “Of course we have selected and certified trusted cloud providers to ensure that our customers’ data is uploaded and stored at the highest level of security, and that it can be quickly available in case of a local disaster. Our cloud solution is also very flexible, so our customers and service providers can move their data from one cloud storage provider to another, should they need or decide to. Retrospect’s flexibility extends to both on-site and off-site protection, allowing us to serve the SMB market in the best possible way.”

Pricing and Availability

Retrospect v11 for Windows and Retrospect v13 for Mac are available immediately. These versions are free updates for customers with current qualifying annual support and maintenance contracts and are immediately available from resellers or retrospect.com as an electronic download. Retrospect is available in 6 languages: English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, and Japanese.

Pricing for Retrospect ranges from $119 for Retrospect Desktop, which protects a single non-server computer and up to five additional networked computers, to $3,999 for Retrospect Multi Server, which protects as many Mac, Windows, and Linux servers and PCs as your bandwidth and storage capacity will allow. Upgrades range from $69 to $2,509. (All prices listed above are MSRP in USD.) Special pricing is available for Education, Government, and Non-Profit settings. For a complete listing of new and upgrade product pricing, please visit retrospect.com.

About Retrospect

Retrospect backup and recovery software provides small and midsize businesses with the reliability, ease of use, power, and flexibility needed to protect critical data on mixed-platform networks. Retrospect offers local and offsite backups, precise point-in-time restores, file-level deduplication, iOS remote management of multiple backup servers, end-user-initiated restores, and industry-leading customer support. With more than two decades of field-tested expertise and millions of users worldwide, Retrospect meets the needs of organizations that require the highest level of recoverability.

We're pleased to announce that Retrospect 10.5 for Windows and Retrospect 12.5 for Mac are now certified for LTO-7 tape devices.

Tape backup remains an essential part of a complete backup strategy and serves as an excellent complement to disk backup. Tape is a cheap, durable storage format that businesses can easily move to off-site locations, so it's an appropriate destination for a second copy of a backup set or an archive of old content. Retrospect makes it easy to back up directly to tape or transfer an existing disk backup set to a tape set for long-term storage.

LTO-7 is the seventh generation of the LTO format standard, the world's most popular tape format, with a native capacity of 6TB and a compressed capacity of 15TB. For comparison, LTO-6 had a native capacity of 2.5TB with a compressed capacity of 6.25TB. The LTO-7 format represents a 2.4x increase in data storage. For more information about LTO, visit LTO.org.

George has worked on the Retrospect product for 13 years, going all of the way back to v5.0 for Mac. Throughout his Retrospect career, he has played a role in 13 different versions- seven Mac and five Windows.

Where can you see his hand on the product? Just a few of his claims to fame are, continued development of the Retrospect clients, Mac engine development, and Windows application development. Most recently he has been working on adding support for Exchange 2016 to the product.

In his free time, George is an active supporter of youth soccer, and for the past 12 years has coached an American Youth Soccer Organization team. His most recent team of 12 and 13 year-olds made it to the playoffs!﻿

1,026 IT Pros Follow Retrospect, Inc.

Similar Vendors

About Retrospect, Inc.

Retrospect, Inc. develops backup and recovery software designed to meet the needs of professionals and small-to-midsize businesses in need of precise, reliable restores, and the very best customer support available.